Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Amy   

mystery

This book within a book written by Anthony Horowitz includes a) a mystery novel written by an author named Alan Conway as the final novel, Magpie Murders, in his Atticus Pund detective series and b) the overarching mystery novel that attempts to determine whether Alan Conway’s untimely death was a suicide or a murder.

As followers of my reviews know, I’m not a huge mystery genre fan.  I would never have read this book except that I owned it. I got it for free 2 years ago at the ALA Midwinter Convention where it came highly recommended and then sat on my shelf unread. Since then, it has received significant public praise so I was curious about it and finally got around to reading it.  They said it was different than the typical murder mystery.  And, I must say that I did enjoy most of it. 

I liked that it was a book in a book.  And I really enjoyed the “inner” Atticus Pund novel. The characters were fun and the story was a good one that drew me in. However, the more current “outer” story being investigated by Susan, the editor of the Atticus Pund series, was cumbersome and drawn out. Her character was awkward in her endeavors and her story was not charming like the Atticus Pund story. Much of it did not interest me. And the inclusion in Susan’s story of further writing samples went on too long and lost my interest. The one interesting aspect of Susan’s story was that it gave insight into the writing and publishing industry that I hadn’t connected with so well previously.

So, I MOSTLY liked it more than I expected to like it.